A normal user's look into the world of 3D Stereo Technologies

Here is an interesting issue being reported by Jacob Pederson about using a SLI setup along with a 3D DLP HDTV and 3D Vision for stereoscopic 3D gaming. Jacob has dual GTX480 in SLI with a Mitsubishi WD-60735 3D HDTV and reports he is having the issue with a slight delay between the image displayed for the left and right eye with SLI enabled while when the SLI is disabled the issue is gone. And this issue has been present for a while now and is still there even with the latest drivers. You can easily spot it with Starcraft 2 as on the example video posted here and you can easily test on your system to confirm, moving the cursor in the menu should be visible as a single image and not leave trails as the cursor is rendered in 2D in the menu, however with SLI enabled you can see that there is a trail after without the glasses. When you put on the 3D glasses you will not see trail, but the cursor will feel weird as the trail is actually the image for the second eye that is being displayed with a slight delay. Other easy to spot places in StarCraft 2 are the green loading bars, the spaceship dropping your marines in the first campaign mission etc. These are easy to spot when not wearing the glasses, but when you wear you will feel that something is wrong with the picture and it will be uncomfortable, although you will not be able to spot the problem as when not wearing the glasses. The reason for that is that the difference between the image for the left and for the right eye is interpreted by the brain in order to create the depth feeling and if things are messed up like this, then the brain cannot properly build the depth for the scene…

Now, normally this issue is not present if you are using an HDMI 1.4 3D HDTV for stereoscopic 3D gaming along with 3DTV Play. That is if you are playing in 720p 50/60Hz mode, but apparently it is present in the 1080p 24Hz 3D mode or there is something that is creating similar effect but less apparent when using the 24Hz mode for gaming. That needs some more testing, but you can more easily spot the disturbing effect in StarCraft II and Bioshock 2 for example. When using 3D Vision normally with SLI there is no such issue present, that is when you have StarCraft 2 running in Fullscreen mode, but if you switch the game to Fullscreen (Windowed) and voila, you get the same strange delay with SLI that Jacob has shown on the video above, but you get it with a 3D Vision and a 3D LCD monitor. You are also welcome to try that and report your findings.